On Reading Aloud

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ON READING ALOUD

BY MURIEL HARRIS

Is reading aloud merely a dead-and-gone Victorian manifesta-
tion with green rep for its shroud, mahogany for its coffin, a
chandelier to toll its parting? Does it belong in an age in which
stuffed birds and woolwork have only now achieved the romance
of history? Was it even then just a fashion, or was it also
the expression of a period which, beside the gross materialism of
mechanical invention, the sanctity of possession, yet had a sense
of direction, of uplift, a sense, perchance, of Tightness, upon which
a humbler — even a humiliated — world to-day looks back upon
with awe and wonder? For, despite the Darwins and the Huxleys,
the Victorian era was an era of belief. Even the Victorian atheist
believed that there was no God. Belief in science was itself a
religion. The arid doctrine of Mill filled his disciples with faith
in rationalism, while the Ruskins, the William Morrises, the Pass-
more Edwardses, believed, actually believed — and thousands be-
lieved with them — in a humanity which could be reached by the
good, the true, the beautiful, were it only set before them. The
Oxford movement, the sanctity of work, the worthwhileness of
things (even the smallest things), the struggles of the pre-Raphael-
ites, the Comtists, the Tolstoys, the Thackerays, to get back to
first principles, long overlaid by smothering convention, all these
things constituted a new faith in man, in the regeneration of man.
And with the regeneration of man came the regeneration of wo-
man. And with the regeneration of woman came the education
movement, the bringing of the library into the drawing-room.
The Lydia Languishes of this world dropped out. Reading aloud
came into its own again from the days of Milton. And if it
sometimes was but a competitor with water-color drawing and
woolwork, and even a loser beside the art of getting married and
having an establishment, yet there it was — a means of communi-
cation and expansion in the Victorian home, a garden gateway to

346 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

the flowers of the mind. In so far as it reached its apotheosis in
the Victorian era, thus far was reading aloud a Victorian institu-
tion; in so far as it was one of the signs of a great revival, just
so far did it express the expansion of the strait Victorian soul.

There were of course many causes for the universality of read-
ing aloud in the cultured Victorian home. The rise of the Eng-
lish novel alone produced a picture of life, easily understood by
the many, with the popularity of which perhaps the cinemato-
graph to-day alone is comparable. The Victorian era had at its
disposal all the harvest of the great preceding century, from the
strong meat of Tom Jones to the delicate flavor of The Vicar of
Wakefield. For the hyper-refined, there was that paragon, Sir
Charles Grandison. For the young-lady public of the circulating
library, who more entrancing than "Evelina"? The hope, the
romance, the belief of the nineteenth century itself, were reflected
by the Reades, the Eliots, the Stevensons, the Daudets, the
Brontes, and a score of others. Nor was the edge taken off the
appetite for literature by the hors d'oeuvre of the short story or
the magazine. Fanny Burney was read at length in every home.
Victor Hugo might have written ten great volumes of Les
Miserables instead of five. The Dickens numbers made every
bosom palpitate in the little towns which watched for them at the
weekly readings. And they might go on and on, so eagerly were
they read, like the stories of the paladins in the Sicilian puppet-
shows, on every winter evening — ending with a snap at the criti-
cal point, whetting the appetite for more — not unlike the serial
detective stories on the cinematograph, which always leave the
young woman in mid-air or mid-water until the following per-
formance. Not the eagerly expected war-books or sensational
revelations from the Versailles Conference ever created a public
such as that of the Victorian drawing-room, eagerly awaiting the
evening reading.

Reading aloud of course opened a door to women far more
than to men. While the novel held the floor, educated women,
who are now old, will tell you that most of their education was
derived from reading aloud after dinner or after tea. And
where you are expert in economics or social history, they will
know their Gibbon and disapprove of Ferrari; and where

ON READING ALOUD 347

you are an enthusiast for "vers libre," they will know their
Scott, their Tennyson, and, above all, their Browning; possibly,
too, their Homer and their Vergil. And where you will flaunt
your personal freedom and plain-speaking, they will suggest
the dignity, the poise, of their own generation, the flavor of its
reticences, the sense of human dignity which belongs to their
generation. Perhaps the past is always golden. What was —
what is — really the magic of reading aloud?

One thing it is not. It is not theatrical. Actors rarely read
well, because they are too personal. The reader who endeavors
by his expression to interpret character is intolerable, a bore.
For one thing, he is usurping the function of the author, pla-
giarizing his descriptions and explanations. On the other hand,
personal traits in reading — really personal to the person and not
to the character — sometimes can lend ineffable charm. It may
be the way the hand holds the book; the way the reader settles
himself to read. Perhaps it is a lace ruffle, a cameo bracelet, a
trick of nervousness in starting. Sometimes it is a humorous
intonation. "And the Lord said unto Moses," read the Squire
and invariably cleared his throat after getting an impetus by
accentuating the and. Everybody would have missed that
"and." There was something solid and comforting about it.
You knew where you were. And it was above all entirely per-
sonal — unlike the convention of the Dickens reader, whose
regular sentimentalities were on a level with the "little che-ild"
of the melodrama and soft music and the like. The professional
reader is rarely a success just because he has not the opportunity
to convey this personal impression. Voice again counts enor-
mously, but rather in a negative sense. It is the forgetting of
the voice that counts, not its emphasis. And this is perhaps
natural in that the complete merging of the book and the reader
produces a single effect, which would be confused by the existence
of a double element. Most readers gravitate naturally towards
the books in which they are most able thus to merge themselves.
While a man will read Shaw, a woman will read Trollope. Two
of the best readers in England were Dr. John Bridges and Mrs.
Frederic Harrison. The one read Jacobs and history; the other,
Framley Parsonage and Sir Charles Grandison. I have to-day an

348 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

unforgettable vision of the dashing Lady G. and her "marmoset,"
of the "sprightly and accomplished Miss Byron," who could
never, never, be persuaded to name the day, who only at Grand-
mamma Selby's "Harriet — my love" stepped forward, blushing
to tread a measure with Sir Charles. And it is unforgettable
because it is interwoven with a personality, gracious, dignified,
steeped in French and English Memoirs, with a background of
Turner and the France of the Seventies and Herbert Spencer and
Thiers and Garibaldi and the rest; because it recalls a beautiful
voice and an atmosphere of books and old china, the flashing of
an emerald ring, endurance, self-restraint — an odd mixture of
gentleness and iron, those Victorian women — of ignorance too,
and of accomplishment as we understand it to-day. An odd
mixture, once more, of prudishness and broad-mindedness, which
could comfortably read Tom Jones aloud, but as imperturbably
say "um — um" as it skipped the undesirable pages. Not one of
them could have understood a Stock Exchange transaction and
their minds had been trained to close automatically at the sound
of the word " business." But most of them spoke French beauti-
fully, and many of them could listen with pleasure to Goldoni in
the original. Most of them could converse easily with the for-
eigner, and there was far less of the barrier of nationality which
to-day obscures our meanings. And it came out in their reading,
for they read with a background not merely of national but of
international culture; it came out in the modulation of their
voices, and it came out in their presence, tranquil, reticent, self-
possessed.

In an age of haste, leisureliness is become a charm — a charm
that is kept in a museum, to be sure, but a charm none the less.
It had its dull side, counted in the stitches of the woolwork and
patchwork, of which the merit was that they took years to finish.
But while the dulness is forgotten, the fragrance remains; also a
certain stateliness. Leisureliness has a measure, a rhythm,
while haste stumbles and wastes. Leisureliness has values; there
is no value in haste — only a lack of poise. And reading aloud had
of all things to be leisurely — as leisurely as a patchwork quilt or
curtains of the finest netting. It had to have time for the savor-
ing. Possibly, like other appreciations, it helped in the creation

ON READING ALOUD 349

of good writing. Dear Fanny Burney must have responded to
the Piozzis of her day; certainly George Eliot expanded in the sun
of universal appreciation. When Dickens was a household word,
there Was something worth while for which to write — very differ-
ent from our hurried fluttering of pages, when beloved books no
longer open of themselves at a love-scene of a Rochester and
Jane, or the three-cornered duel of a Marryat. It was cause and
effect and effect and cause, the two acting and reacting upon each
other to the greater stimulus both of reading and of writing.

The mere charm of words is underrated to-day. Half our words
are never pronounced at all except in conversation. The amazing
verbal subtleties and Tightnesses of a Stevenson, a Conrad, are
lost— most of them — in the haste and the silence in which they are
read. We never hear them with their rhythm and their shading
— the same rhythm which attracts old gentlemen to mouth the
Mneid with gusto to a non-appreciative second and third genera-
tion. Perhaps this subsidence of the poet from the palmy days
of Victorianism to the straggling efforts at revival of our day is
in some measure due to the decline in reading aloud and the grow-
ing meaninglessness of such phrases as "the music of words."
Only the few know how to read poetry at all, because they think
it must be declaimed, shouted, chanted, danced, anything but
read. And thus we never get the full translation of the author's
mind. The Victorian periods, measures, seem to us ridiculous,
and we have transferred them, say, to dancing, which gets all the
color and the rhythm, and in its turn, perhaps, will become as
meaningless. For words need to be used, to be articulated.
Beautiful speech, beautiful voice modulation, is hardly ever an
affair of nature alone, certainly not of deliberate neglect. Words
form an instrument to which constant practice alone gives results.
And there is the measure of the thing as well. Just as the Pala-
din puppet-shows and cinematographs alike recognize the need
for stimulating by restraint, so with reading aloud, there are
restraining limits, a beginning and an end, a time and a place,
most of all a personality, without which the pleasure vanishes.
There is no sitting up all night to finish it: dramatic, but feverish;
delicious but self-indulgent; accounting for the unsatisfactoriness
of many an end. Books cannot be spoilt, even with the increas-

350 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

ingly long sessions, by a peeping at the end, a rude prying into the
author's intention, before he wishes to disclose it. Courtesy to-
wards the author has at least something to do with the charm of his
book, and here the reader is omnipotent, and can manipulate his
climaxes, keeping you breathless as D'Artagnan rides to the coast;
or he can so suppress himself that his own dryness underlines
George Birmingham's whimsical humor and his inimitable por-
trayal of the Irish character. Reading aloud holds the listener
up, restrains him, cultivates his zest, and then rewards his re-
straint and anticipation in full measure. Who does not know the
cold dead feeling of finishing to yourself a book that was begun
aloud, the deadness, the loss of color and relief? It involves all
the difference between seeing the sights with a lover, and seeing
them with Baedeker. And then there are the other listeners,
too. Crowd psychology comes in here. There is a difference
between listening to a book alone, and listening to it mirrored
equally in the appreciations of other people. Here again this
raises all the values, doubles the reflections, makes the book as
intensely living as it is possible for it to be.

Apart from its intrinsic qualities, there is no doubt that reading
aloud is associated with traditions which color and captivate our
imaginations. Nineteenth-century scholarship read aloud with
zest, and nineteenth-century scholarship has no mean roll of
names. And then — Tennyson used to read his own works down
at Blackdown, with its purple-crowned heights and its wide
view of the Sussex Weald. Christina Rossetti read her poems,
and charming Grant Allen his stories. At Rye, city of the fairy-
tales, or at his flat on the Chelsea Embankment, Henry James
would utter himself to a select few. Old Archbishop Whateley
educated his "accomplished " daughters by reading to them aloud;
while in the families of the Lushingtons, the Hobhouses, the Tre-
velyans, reading aloud was part of the day's routine. And always
it was associated with those mellow firelit hours after tea, with the
Victorian drawing-rooms, whether of Winterhalter or of William
Morris, of willow-patterns, or of fret-work and white marble.
And you traced idly the roses on the Aubusson carpet, or the
hawthorne of the china vase, or — yes, it must be admitted — the
plush snake round the bottom of the glass-cased clock, and you

ON READING ALOUD 351

watched the lamplight shine softly on a silver head, or light up
the "Salve Roma" of a Victorian bracelet; and — yds — there was
a perfume, too, of warmth and flowers and leaves of old books
and scented leather; and all unconsciously, you wove them into
stories of the worldly Archdeacon Grantley and his daughter
Griselda, of Mrs. Proudie, for whose downfall you longed, but
lamented when it came; of windmill fighters and Micawbers
equally, of the romance of the Victorian age and the realism of the
Edwardian; of Shaw and his Other Island — and a hundred others.
And f orevermore the stories became inseparable from that golden
border-land where perhaps, alone, different generations can meet
as one; inseparable from a special winter's evening when the red
curtains were drawn early; inseparable from the moment when
at last you hurried up to dress, still walking on clouds which
remained substantial till the next ones displaced them. Reading
aloud still exists, and Caesar and Cleopatra has a place with Julius
Caesar. But so much exists besides. There is the making of
many stories easily obtainable; there is the transformation of the
school into something more like home, yet not like home, in
which reading aloud has a place, though a different place. There
is the greater knowledge of actual facts with less left to the imagi-
nation, and with it, the unutterably perplexing task of selection.
So that reading aloud is far more of a function than an art; more
definitely educational than just enjoyable; a competitor — gener-
ally at a disadvantage — with the quicker methods of the cinemat-
ograph, of nature-study, of reading alone; a little old-fashioned
in a world of the entirely new. And so it has fallen away, and
some of its magic has gone, and it actually does belong to a
period which can never be real again. Its personalities are less
personal and its coloring is less mellow, and those who enjoyed
it realize that while it remains, its atmosphere has gone. At its
best, it belongs now to those "good old times" which none of us
ever appreciated until they were gone.

Muriel Harris.